Sparky
Well Known Member
...at least that's my observation.
When I tried to update the firmware in my dual AFS EF/EM-4500 EFIS installation (not yet flying) several weeks ago, I had difficulties getting the EFIS/EMS units to recognize the SD cards upon power-on.
Without making a short story long, it turned out the problem was the SD cards I was using for the update. I was using 2GB Dane-Elec SD cards initially, since I found them at a better price than the SanDisk 2GB cards originally supplied by AFS. I could not get the Dane-Elec SD cards (yes, I tried more than one) to work reliably, but I finally got one to load after several tries.
So I reformatted on of the SanDisk 2GB SD MAP cards supplied by AFS and it worked flawlessly (but I had to reformat it and reload the MAP software afterwards). Both the Dane-Elec and SanDisk cards were properly formatted to FAT32 per the instructions using Windows Vista and there were no problems reading the cards on my PC, but the AFS 4500's would not reliably read the Dane-Elec SD cards. I may have just gotten a couple of bad cards, or it may be an issue with the AFS units, I don't know.
For the most recent update I went out and bought a couple of SanDisk 2GB SD cards, formatted them to FAT32, loaded and upgraded the software without a glitch.
Lesson learned... (YMMV)
When I tried to update the firmware in my dual AFS EF/EM-4500 EFIS installation (not yet flying) several weeks ago, I had difficulties getting the EFIS/EMS units to recognize the SD cards upon power-on.
Without making a short story long, it turned out the problem was the SD cards I was using for the update. I was using 2GB Dane-Elec SD cards initially, since I found them at a better price than the SanDisk 2GB cards originally supplied by AFS. I could not get the Dane-Elec SD cards (yes, I tried more than one) to work reliably, but I finally got one to load after several tries.
So I reformatted on of the SanDisk 2GB SD MAP cards supplied by AFS and it worked flawlessly (but I had to reformat it and reload the MAP software afterwards). Both the Dane-Elec and SanDisk cards were properly formatted to FAT32 per the instructions using Windows Vista and there were no problems reading the cards on my PC, but the AFS 4500's would not reliably read the Dane-Elec SD cards. I may have just gotten a couple of bad cards, or it may be an issue with the AFS units, I don't know.
For the most recent update I went out and bought a couple of SanDisk 2GB SD cards, formatted them to FAT32, loaded and upgraded the software without a glitch.
Lesson learned... (YMMV)